A cold and broken Hallelujah...

I'm pretty positive that I have PTSD.

I have never been officially diagnosed with that, but I have had lots of therapy and I lived with someone who had severe PTSD for 15 years, so I'm confident in saying that PTSD is among the side effects of my divorce.

This post is really not about that, though.

This post is about my life these past 2 years, about what pulled me out of a spiral that nearly killed me. I am writing this particular post because all I wanted to know when my world crumbled was what to do. I asked anyone that I knew who was divorced, "How did you handle this?" "What happens now?" "Please tell me how to fix this, how to live this, how to be divorced." Because, like I hope all people who vow to love someone forever, I had no intention of having that end. I felt so at sea, so lost as to where to even begin to piece my life back together.

I'm still piecing it together, of course.

But I have, mostly through sheer trial and error, figured out some things that helped. And I feel compelled to share that on here, just in case someone stumbles across this blog that needs to hear any of this. That scared girl that I was 2 years ago-this is what she wanted to hear, to know, to feel in her bones, just so that she would know that things would be okay. Hard as it is to believe, Joy Elizabeth, we are still alive and breathing and figuring life out.

The absolute most aching time in this whole process was the very beginning. And I knew that even at the time, in that scary fog that I was operating in, I kept saying to myself, "This part sucks. But the next part will be better." I had no idea if that was true, but I needed to believe it. My main coping mechanism has been to just pretend that I'm okay until I actually feel okay. But this was the hardest part-I was down a dark hole, barely able to function at all, unable to eat, unable mostly to even get out of bed.

Somehow, and I so wish that I could remember how this happened because I sadly do not, I managed to get up out of bed. I forced myself to eat once a day until I had anything of an appetite.

And when I emerged from that particular black hole, I was pretty skinny.

It was the first thing that people noticed. I got a lot of positive feedback because of it. And that is the one thing that I genuinely wish for anyone who has to go through a terribly dark period, because it felt good to hear, "Well, you look great."

Now, naturally, starving is not a good thing to do to yourself.

However, the hard part was done. What was left for me to do was maintain a smaller body in a healthy way. And that is what I have managed to do for these 2 years so far. I gave up bread, I eat lots of vegetables and fruits, and I eat some protein with every meal in order to maintain muscle.

I work out every day. I do a combination of yoga and abdominal work and I lift weights. I'm never going to be a cut, lean body builder. But I do find that starting my day with exercise clears my head. I call it eating my frog. One of my co-workers went to a training once where they told you, if there is something that you need to do every day that you don't particularly want to do, do it first. And then you will have "eaten the frog" for the day.

Trust me, this was not a panacea. For almost a year, I couldn't bear to think that anyone saw even the smallest flaw in my appearance. It came from a very deep seeded belief that if someone saw a flaw-any blemish at all -they would see immediately that I was a girl who was so unperfect her husband had to abandon his family to get away from her.

I have slowly begun to make my peace with that.

I'm trying to allow myself the space to allow my scars to show, the space to feel crazy and different and who I am, inside of a body that is as unperfect as the rest of me. I'm not going to lie, it's hard. What if I gain weight and no one ever asks me out again? What if all I have from the past two years of struggling to move forward is that I look better? It's complicated and tricky. Yes, I know that I am much more than my body. Yes, I know that looks are superficial. But I can't really overstate how important it is to me that I look different.

It's like a baptism by fire. This process burned away all of these parts of me that were clouded in self-doubt, these parts of me that believed that somehow just being as passive as is humanly possible was a positive character trait. I want to look like a different person because I am a different person. The old Joy is still inside of me, scars and all. But who I am is fundamentally different and I can't go back. And that, in my experience, is the hallmark of a PTSD survivor. It's hard to describe, there aren't words that I can get my arms around to adequately explain that sharp before and after to my life.

I am a person slowly (oh, so slowly) coming into her own as a fully functioning adult. I don't have all the answers. I feel ashamed that I fell so far apart over losing my marriage because there are people in this world who have lost far more than me. I'm a blessed person and I know that with every beat of my heart. But I absolutely have to own that shame, and that sadness, because I want to be able to say, here is a small step that will help. Here is a tiny speck of hope. Even if the only person that I am truly writing this for is that scared girl that I was 2 years ago, unsure of how to begin to emerge from that dark abyss.